Genocidaires Upholding International Order
by Kim Petersen / May 1st, 2013
A common argument, albeit without any basis in morality, against
redressing injustices is that they belong to the past. Hence, African
Americans have never been indemnified for the slavery their descendants
suffered, and the White slave-owning descendants continue, in many
cases, to prosper based in large part on the largess extracted from
unpaid past labor. Furthermore, if people can stop bending themselves
around the obvious and straight on acknowledge the genocide against the
Original Peoples of the western hemisphere, they still likeliest will
evade the killing and dispossession and justify the status quo because
what happened was in the past.
However, injustices have always had a starting point in the past with the
injustices differing as to which point in the past they had their
start. The Zionist dispossession and genocide of Palestinians is of a
more decidedly recent starting point than 1492.
So unfortunately genocides are not confined to the past but still
occur in our supposedly enlightened times. Abdul Haq al-Ani and Tarik
al-Ani tackle a very recent genocide: a genocide that is concealed by
the corporate or state media of the West, the genocide perpetrated in
Iraq by the United States and aided by the United Kingdom and the
coalition of the killing.
Amid all the words written about the evil that beset Iraq and
destroyed around a million lives; uprooted millions of other lives;
destroyed the infrastructure that employs people, feeds people, is
responsible for their sanitation, healthcare, and education; obliterated a vast
repository of knowledge, history, and culture; then imposed an
embargo to prevent the rebuilding of the what was destroyed is the word
usually missing: genocide. The evil was based on a lie — the
lie that Iraq possessed weapons-of-mass destruction. This US-UK lie was
then — in a preposterous inversion of morality and logic — used to
massively destroy a country, its people, its society, and its culture.
Abdul Haq al-Ani and Tarik al-Ani have written a very readable legal tour de
force: Genocide in Iraq: The Case against the UN Security Council and Member
States (Clarity Press). As is evident from the title, Haq al-Ani and Tarik
al-Ani do not let the United Nations Security Council or the
unprotesting member states of the UN off the hook for the West’s
genocide in Iraq.
Haq al-Ani and Tarik al-Ani begin with self-incriminating quotations
by American officials and by providing the historical backdrop of Iraq,
the treachery of Sykes-Picot, how Iraq was geographically blocked from
ready access to the Persian Gulf, how Kuwait was created by British
colonial fiat, how a monarchial client regime was installed in Iraq, and how
Iraq’s oil wealth was plundered for British capitalist profit.
The history continues with the overthrow of the Iraqi monarchy, the
internecine battles for power in Iraq that consolidated under the Ba’ath party
and the rule of Saddam Hussein. The comparatively rapid economic
and social development of Iraq under the Ba’ath is detailed.
The context is important because Iraq is a country that would not
recognize Israel as a legitimate state (and neither do many other Muslim
states, and why should a state formed by European Jews dispossessing
the indigenous Palestinians and maintained by perpetual occupation,
oppression, and warfare against neighbor states and an Israeli society
wherein 20% are discriminated against by the majority?), it had
nationalized its oil for the profit of its own people (not for Big Oil), and it
had developed its economy along socialist lines.
How to destroy Iraq? Saddam Hussein had a large hand in it. He
foolishly decided to solve differences with Iran militarily. Hussein
then fell for the American trap in attacking Kuwait, believing the US
had no opinion on Arab-Arab disputes.
A UN-authorized war to dislodge Iraq from Kuwait and massively destructive
sanctions followed.
Regardless of what explanations and justifications were
given for the military assault on Iraq in January 1991, in reality, the
destruction began on 6 August 1990, the day the Security Council
adopted resolution 661 which imposed the most brutal total blockade
against Iraq. Never before has a state been subjected to such collective
measures, a blockade, not dissimilar to the sieges of the Middle Ages,
which prevented everything from going in or out of the country.
The authors question the legality of the war that targeted Iraqi
power systems, roads, railroads, and perhaps domestic petroleum
production. There was a purpose behind it. A planning officer
interviewed by the Washington Post said, “What we were doing with the attacks
on the infrastructure was to accelerate the effect of sanctions.”
The Persian Gulf Slaughter of 1991 was an opportunity for the US and
UK to battle test their weaponry, including depleted uranium (DU),
Blu-82 fuel-air bombs, cluster bombs — and a nuke? Genocide in Iraq notes, “The
most serious report was that of the award-winning Canadian
journalist, William Thomas, who reported that a nuclear weapon was
detonated 11 miles east of Basrah sometime between 2 and 5 February.”
A snapshot of the genocide was provided by the authors describing the targeting
and destruction of the Amiriya civilian shelter.
The bombs penetrated the meter-deep layer of earth,
passed through one meter of reinforced concrete slab, through the top
floor and through another meter of reinforced concrete floor slab to the lower
floor. The impact of the bomb caused all the water, fuel tanks
and boiler to explode, filling the lower floor with a mixture of boiling water
and fuel to a depth of two meters. All the medical staff were
killed instantly and the emergency power supply was destroyed, rendering all
life-supporting systems inoperative. On the top floor the bomb
generated a tremendous heat estimated to have reached some 4000 degrees. The
people were incinerated. At the time of the attack there were over
1500 civilians in the shelter. Out of those people only 11 persons are
known to have survived after suffering different degrees of wounds,
burns and psychological trauma. Whole families were wiped out, as could
be seen afterwards from their locked houses in Amiriya. The bodies of
the medical staff were found floating in the water-fuel mixture of the
lower floor. The caretakers of the shelter claim that the black, burnt
walls still have human skin and flesh stuck to them.
The ignominy of war crimes included the slaughter of surrendering soldiers:
At the March-April European Parliament hearings at the
end of the Gulf War, Mike Erlich, member of the Military Counseling
Network, described the execution of defeated soldiers: “Hundreds,
possibly thousands of Iraqi soldiers began walking toward the U.S.
position unarmed, with their arms raised in an attempt to surrender.
However, the orders for this unit were not to take any prisoners … the
commander of the unit began firing. At this point, everybody in the unit began
shooting. Quite simply it was a slaughter.”
Weaponry spills blood and provides a vivid and horrifying image of
death. However, after the weapons were silenced, the destruction
continued. The authors write:
Perhaps the most sinister part of all this is that the
world did not realize that the war had not ended; it had only taken
another form. This time the weapon was the blockade, which deprived the
people of Iraq of access to food, medicine and the basic needs of a
normal life.
Genocide in Iraq details the lethality of sanctions.
The sanctions also revealed racism. Haq al-Ani and Tarik al-Ani note
that the UN spent more of feeding dogs used for demining operations
($400 per dog per year) than on Iraqis ($170 per person per year).
The authors criticize the UN for the “amazing lack of UN documents
available to the public” and accuse the UN of hypocrisy vis-a-vis UN
treatment of Israel (I have made the argument that the West, and also
the UN, could not morally mobilize against UN members alleged to be in
contravention of international law while Israel remains in long-term
contravention of international law and that this was particularly
relevant to Iraq.1
Genocide in Iraq argues that the sanctions against Iraq
hindered the entire population of its most fundamental right: the right
to life. The al-Haqs write:
In fact it is submitted here that the imposition of
sanctions on Iraq, when it was no longer a threat to international
peace, was itself an act of war or aggression and by imposing the
sanctions, the Security Council was itself guilty of breaching
international law.
The UN was breaching law illogically and immorally: “Total sanctions
do not stop wars but become themselves acts of war. By denying people
the right to work and earn, they deny them the most fundamental right to life.
By forcing people to lose their jobs, they take away all their
dignity.”
The authors cite laws such as the Hague Regulations and Geneva
Conventions. They find that Article 85 of the Geneva Conventions,
Protocol 1, establishes four facts:
1. Making civilians the object of attack is a grave breach of the
Protocol.
>2. Grave breaches of the Protocol are regarded as war crimes.
>3. There is no scope for introducing the balance of any military
advantage that could result from an attack on civilians as a mitigating
or annulling factor in determining whether war crimes had been
committed.
>4. The Security Council would have committed a war crime in imposing
>total sanctions against Iraq.
In putting forward the case of genocide, the authors note of the UN:
The irony here is that while both appreciated the fact
that the UN had become entitled to intervene to prevent genocide, they
did not envisage the possibility that the UN itself could end up
implementing conditions which lead to genocide as we submit it did in
imposing total sanctions on the people of Iraq.
While the US wreaked genocide, the authors are clear that the UNSC is complicit
in the genocide:
… we need to make it clear here, that as a practicing
lawyer and commentator and researcher, we believe that nobody— including no
entity—ought to be above the law. It should not be possible for
states or combinations of states to commit major jus cogens crimes and be
relieved of culpability under the pretext that they
operated collectively in whatever guise—that of institutions or of
treaties, or of intergovernmental entities, whatever the covering entity might
be, any more than for individuals to do so, as officials of
states. This necessarily means that the United Nations Security Council
could be in breach of International Law and therefore ought to be liable to
questioning about its decisions.
The authors decry hypocrisy and call for a fair playing field in international
law.
If it is alleged that it was because Iraq invaded Kuwait, then we should
remember that both Israel and the USA had invaded so
many countries in the 20th century. Egypt invaded and annexed the
Hala’ib triangle from the Sudan, an area which is larger than Kuwait,
without a word of objection from the so-called world community.
To this end, the authors call for fundamental change: “We have called for a
major reform of the UN creating a balanced and just system in
which no single state, however mighty it may [be], would be able to hold the
world to ransom, and where disputes are settled by an international court that
is independent of the UN and whose judgments are
enforceable.”
The Iraqi governments following the 2003 invasion are also culpable – “hav[ing]
been nothing more than agents and tools of the USA. … It is
inconceivable that an occupying power would take all the effort and cost to
invade and occupy a country only to let it choose a government
opposed to the invader’s interests.”
Finally, the authors call for a Nuremberg-type tribunal “and an
application of the same principles which were applied in Nuremberg and
upheld by the USA/UK and their allies as high moral and legal principles and
precedents.”
Genocide in Iraq poses a farcical paradigm that underscores
the importance of its message. As it stands now, alleged genocidaire,
the United States, is pushing for regime change in Syria. The inevitable result
is another cataclysmic loss of life. Alleged co-genocidaire, the UN, is
“mediating” the “situation” in Syria.
Genocide in Iraq is a must read for those who believe in
justice and the equal application of law for all. It is also a must read for
those who seek to understand the attack on Iraq from the Iraqi
perspective — not just western media demonization.
Abdul Haq al-Ani and Tarik al-Ani present their case and leave readers to
render their verdict.
1. See Kim Petersen, “Why Israel is So Relevant Vis–Vis Iraq: The
Politics of Hypocrisy,” Dissident Voice, 15 February 2003. [↩]
Kim Petersen is co-editor of Dissident Voice. He can be reached at:
[email protected]. Read other articles by Kim.
http://dissidentvoice.org/2013/05/genocidaires-upholding-international-order/#more-48670
.....................................................................................................
Irrational Rhetoric, Illegal WarsBoston, Brazil and Islam
by RAMZY BAROUD
During his talk sponsored by the New American Foundation in March
2008, author Parag Khanna addressed the rising challenges facing the
US’s global hegemony. According to Khanna, China and the European Union
are the new contenders with the battlefield being a global ‘geopolitical
marketplace.’
Aside from Khanna’s insight, one statement particularly puzzled me
greatly. “Why am I talking about Europe, China, and the United States?
What about Russia, what about India, what about Islam ..what about all
those other powers?” Initially, I thought it must have been an error.
The speaker must surely realize that Islam is a religion, not a
political entity with a definable ‘geopolitical marketplace.’ But it was not an
error, or more accurately, it was a deliberate error. Khanna
went on to explain that Islam doesn’t have ‘that kind of coherence’ that allows
it to spread its power and influence, unlike the dominant other
powers which he highlighted. According to that odd logic, Islam and
Brazil were discussed in a similar context.
This sort of twisted reasoning has flourished as an academic
discipline-turned-industry since the terrorist attacks of September 11,
2001. Sure, it existed prior to this date, but its ‘experts’ and their
then few think-tanks were largely placed within a decidedly pro-Israel,
Zionist and right-wing political orthodoxy. In the last decade or so,
the relatively specialized business multiplied and became mainstream
wisdom. Its numerous ‘experts’ – who are more like intellectual
purveyors – became well-known faces in American news networks. Their
once ‘politically incorrect’ depiction of Arabs, Muslims and the
non-western world at large, became acceptable views which were then
translated into actual policies used for invading countries, torturing
prisoners and flushing Holy Korans down toilets.
It is impracticable to rationally argue with those who are
essentially irrational. Many of us have tirelessly tried to wrangle with those
who want to ‘kill all Muslims’ whenever someone claiming to be a
Muslim is accused of carrying out or planning to carry out an attack
somewhere in the world. The ‘debate’ rages on, not because of the power
of its logic, but because of the heavy price of blood and gore that
continues to be paid due to the deliberate misinformation, utter lies
and subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) intellectual racism that
defines much of the American media and academic discourses.
Numbers are of no relevance in such discussions because absurd media
pundits are not swayed by facts. In the United States, there have been
nearly 900,000 gun fatalities in the last 30 years or so (1980 to
present) compared to around 3,400 terrorism-related fatalities in the
last 40 years or so (1970 to present). These figures include victims of
the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. This unsurprising fact was
recently referenced by MSNBC’s All In With Chris Hayes and raises some
critical points.
If the US wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Yemen (plus numerous other
lesser acts of violence committed in the name of ‘fighting terror’) were indeed
compelled by the preciousness of American lives, then the least
US Congress should do is tighten gun control laws in their own country.
But respected members of Congress are fighting the good fight to keep
things as they are, in the name of protecting the Second Amendment to
the United States Constitution – “..the right of the people to keep and
bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
But rights are infringed at will whenever it suits US foreign policy
makers and their intellectual peddlers. Despite the fact that the war on Iraq
was illegal and that torture of prisoners is a loud violation of
the US’s own Constitution and the Bill of Rights, America’s war rages on and
the Guantanamo gulag is thriving. One cannot help but think that
the US’s legal, political and even moral blind spots must always somehow
involve Muslims.
But of course it’s more complicated than this. Muslims are not
targeted because they are Muslim. Yes, of course, religion and skin
color are important layers in the massive ‘crusade’ – a George W. Bush
term, not mine – in America’s so-called war on terror. But ‘hating
Islam’ is also a convenient pretense to achieve foreign policy
objectives that are centered around imperial domination, thus natural
resources. Neither American foreign policy makers, nor their media
cheerleaders who hardly take a day off from smearing everything Muslim,
are not interested in Islamic theology, history, spirituality or values
that are meant to espouse uprightness in the individual and
righteousness in the collective. But there is an army of dishonest
people who would rather comb through every shred of Islamic text to
highlight passages out of context just to prove that Islam is
fundamentally flawed, teaches hate or ‘anti-Semitism’ and that it
celebrates a supposed ‘culture of death.’
These very men and women would have done the same, as their
predecessors have, to demonize any other culture, religion or community
that sat on large deposits of oil or dare exist in an area of strategic
importance to the United States or within an alarming proximity to
Israel.
The anti-Islam tirade received another boost following the Boston
Marathon Bombings of April 15, 2013, which were blamed on two
American-Chechen brothers, Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev. The
anti-Muslim circus was back in town, as political jugglers, along with
media acrobats seemed to reach the ever predicable conclusion: hate all
Muslims and do whatever possible to exploit any tragedy to further US
hegemonic interest in the Middle East. Eric Rush, a Fox News pundit,
summed up that sentiment when he called for the killing of all Muslims
following the bombings and then later claimed that his tweets were meant to be
sarcastic. Ann Coulter, on the other hand, called for women to be put in jail
for ‘wearing a Hijab.’
This type of hate-mongering is of course not random, no matter how
palpably ‘crazy’ the people behind it are. It is an essential component
of ensuring that a largely uninformed public is always on board whenever the US
is ready for yet another military adventure involving Muslim
countries.
All of this rhetoric must also be juxtaposed with what is happening
in the Middle East. There, yet a new war is brewing, one that is largely aimed
at ensuring that the current chaos underway in the so-called
‘Arab Spring’ countries will yield favorable results from the view
points of Israel, America and the west. The new push for military
intervention started with Israeli allegations that the Syrian regime is
using chemical weapons against opposition forces, followed by
British-French allegations, and finally, despite brief hesitation,
concurred by U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel.
Over 70,000 people have reportedly been killed in the Syrian civil
war. In the last two years it has become a hub for unprecedented
regional and international rivalry, a Great Game of sorts. The US,
Israel and their allies have watched as Syria, once considered a
‘threat’ to Israeli security, descended into inconceivable brutality
involving the Syrian army, various factions and bands of fighters from
near and far. It was a matter of time before the US and its allies made
their move to seal Syria’s fate and to ensure quiet at the Israeli
northeastern frontier.
For that to happen, Muslims must be hated and dehumanized in ways
that would make war a tad less ugly and future violence, in some odd
way, ‘justifiable.’
The official purpose of Hagel’s recent visit to Israel was to
finalize US arms sales to Israel and other countries which total about
$10 billion. Knowing how such weapons have been used in the past, one
can hardly appreciate the ‘sarcasm’ in Eric Rush’s tweet of wanting to
‘kill them all.’ Per the history of US foreign policy, violent words
often translate into violent action and here lies the real danger of the
supposedly crazy bunch who equate Islam to Brazil and wish to
incarcerate women for wearing scarves.
Ramzy Baroud is editor of PalestineChronicle.com. He is the author of The
Second Palestinian Intifada: A Chronicle of a People’s Struggle and “My
Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story” (Pluto Press, London).
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/05/02/boston-brazil-and-islam/
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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